I focus almost exclusively on PvP, whether solo, small gang, or large bloc warfare. In the past, I've been a miner, mission runner, and faction warfare jockey. I'm particularly interested in helping high-sec players get into 0.0 combat.

Friday, September 12, 2014

Attaining Moderate Wealth

I do read the posts in the Brave Newbies subreddit, even
though I feel a little strange posting in it as a non-member. It’s a great place to find out what different
kinds of players thinks about. A comment
made about my How to Fly a Dramiel post suggested that seeding markets and making isk in null is a lot harder than
I make it out to be.

I know I’m not space-rich. For that reason, I’ve never considered writing
a “how I made my isk” article. But, the
topic was raised, and I wanted to go through how I made my isk, if only to show
that it’s very possible to be comfortable, even without being ground-breaking
or particularly smart. If I can do it, anyone
can.

I have five characters.
Two are alt characters with less than 2M sp which I use for moon mining
(more on that later… not as inaccessible as you’d think!). Of the other three, one is the alt I started recently,
one is Talvorian, and the last is my ratting alt. Among all of them, I have about 60 bil worth
of isk and assets. That’s not really a
lot, but it does mean I’m comfortable enough that losing ships hurts me in
replacement time, not isk.

I started playing in 2009.
I remember being confused about how anyone actually traveled
anywhere. I panicked when I warped to a
belt and my capacitor was down to almost 50% – I barely had enough to get back
to the station (I know, right?)! I
learned enough of the basics to run missions, feeling a bit of pride the day I
broke 100 mil, but single-player Eve wasn’t very engaging to me and I left
after a few months.

I came back two years later and joined a null-sec jack-of-all-trades
corp. I was buying PLEX to sell for about
400 mil each, which was enough to pay for what ended up being a lot of
losses. I wasn’t really a big fan of paying
for in-game currency (I’m still not), so I didn’t really accrue assets through
PLEX. I turned to anomalies to make
money. Many of my corp- and
alliance-mates talked about how anomalies, and particularly Forsaken Hubs, were
the way to go, so I started running them in a Drake.

I would grind enough isk to afford a new ship, which I’d
take out PvPing and promptly lose. While
my isk wasn’t increasing, I had made the switch from losing PvE ships to
low-sec gate camps (back when I didn’t realize what I was doing or where I was
going) to losing PvP ships in fair fights.
I was learning PvP, and I was enjoying myself.

I realized I had to find a full-time PvP corp if I wanted to
improve my combat flying. I excluded all
the groups who had regularly attacked my former alliance – I didn’t want to
immediately turn around and attack my friends.
That’s when I found Razor. At the
time, my net worth was about 1.5 billion isk.

At the time, Razor held only five systems in Pure
Blind. While they were part of the CFC, this
was long before the CFC was fat and happy with all its beautiful Guristas
ratting space. I loved the PvP, and ran
anoms to pay for my losses. My wallet
increased to about 3 billion isk.

However, within a few short months, the CFC swept across the
northern portion of the map, conquering Branch, Vale, and Fade, then eventually
sealing off the net and taking Tribute. Razor
recovered the Tenal they lost about six months before I joined.

Very soon after, I learned a new term: cosmic signatures. Cosmic signatures are where – up until a few
months ago – the money in null-sec is. I
trained Valeria to have max Tengu skills and perfect scanning, and would scan with
her while Talvorian was PvPing in fleets.
Valeria was able to make isk very quickly in signatures. As time went on, I maxed her training, but
that only gained me the ability to perma-run her tank and reduce the time to
run a site. Because running sigs has a
lot of down-time as you scan, shortening the time to run a single site didn’t
really increase the income. In fact,
most of my sig running happened before my Tengu character was fully trained.

This is when I started plexing my accounts regularly. Running sigs was so profitable that I was
clearing 2-3 billion per month after buying 2 PLEX. I was spending only a very little time
actually ratting, and the rest of the time I was cloaked up with probes
out. If I found a target during PvP, I
could idle my scanner without any risk.
Early on I took some PvE losses as I forgot I jumped her through a gate
with rats on the other side (scanning ships) or an occasional base Tengu was killed,
but the isk was coming in hand-over-fist.

This is when I started trying to diversify my
isk-making. I didn’t want to have to rat
anymore if I could avoid it. Once you
have about 5-6 billion liquid isk, the options start to open up considerably. I started stocking our staging systems with
some small-volume, high-value goods. Players
are always happy to pay to not have to haul their own goods from Jita. Implants, in particular, resulted in good
business. They were small, allowing me
to use my Tengu (nullified, cloaked, and nano’d) to move them, though their
individual sell value was very high.
Acceptable markups for alliance mates still more than made them worth
the trip, and no carrier or jump freighter was needed.

I found a Cadmium moon a few months before the moon goo
prices first dropped, and abandoned it when it wasn’t worth the effort tor run
it anymore. That was a big mistake,
given the current price of Caesarium Cadmide.
I found a few more in 0.4 systems, but being USTZ, I missed the big rush
when CCP officially opened them up, and was left with a few poorly producing
Platinum moons, most of which I abandoned recently. As far as costs, setting up the moon
generally takes about a month’s worth of profit (most of which you get back if
your moon isn’t destroyed). I also had
to “pay” by pausing training on my main characters to briefly skill up two
other characters (as well as start a new corp).
I’d say I’ve made a couple billion off that, all tolled.

I also got into the habit of selling PvP characters. Every so often, I’d decide I wanted to join a
low-sec group with a PvP character, for both legitimate small-gang PvP and
scamming purposes, but as soon as I was in, I’d lose interest. You can really only give your attention to
one corp at a time when you play 2-3 hours.
Besides, after talking with the players in the other corp, I couldn’t
bring myself to scam them. I’m weak like
that.

So, I’d end up with very good, under-priced character buys,
which I’d skill up a little to round out their rough edges and then re-sell
them, usually for 5-6 bil profits.
Through a series of three buy/sell cycles, I turned 4 billion isk into
21 billion isk. Not a bad way to earn a
living.

I also keep my eyes open for any firesales from alliance
mates when a corp or player leaves the alliance or when we re-deploy. I can usually pick up a few T2s or T3s fully
fitted for 50% or 75% of their value.
Mind you, if I make someone in the alliance an offer, it’ll be
reasonably priced. But I’m not above
taking advantage of someone else’s ridiculously low price point!

But the most important factor I’ve found in accruing isk is
in making sure I only have assets I intend to use. Talvorian has ships staged in three systems: a
low-sec roaming staging, the Tenal capital, and our deployment staging system. Sure, I have a variety of ships at each, but
I regularly review them to make sure I’m both willing to undock and familiar
with how to fly it. If something doesn’t
meet that criteria, I sell it in Jita.

Much like in poker, the thing that differentiates a winning
player from a losing player isn’t how much they win when they win, but rather
how much they lose when they lose. Every
time you go out in a ship, know who you want to shoot and how you’re going to
fly it; don’t undock if your goal is to lose your ship. Those losses add up. Don’t actually fly drunk (I know, it’s called
a drunk roam, but that’s just a name…).
And never join a true welp fleet – if the goal is to die, you’ll likely
achieve that goal, and over time that’ll make your wallet drop considerably.

And that’s honestly the only aspect of my income and
expenditure that I think is genuinely difficult to reproduce. Repercussus has an awesome logistics system
in place to supply roaming ships, and Razor puts all of the fleet doctrine
ships on contract for easy resupplying.
I can easily stay well-stocked with ships without having to keep a lot
of supplies myself.

But other than that, the tactics I used to accrue my meager
wealth can be reproduced by anyone.
Access to null-sec isn’t really that hard to come by – even Guristas
space is easy to reach through PBLRD. My
initial isk from buying a couple plex and mission running is hardly
ground-breaking, and the second-tier options – finding a very low-grade moon,
supplying local markets with high-value, high-demand items, and buying and
selling characters, isn’t skill-based at all (granted, you need to train a
couple skills to start a corp and anchor a POS, but the CEO of my moon mining
corp has less than the 900,000 sp provided by an Alpha clone). And all this was done enjoying the game for
2-3 hours a day at most.

The one trick I’d say definitively, though, is that it’s
much easier to PLEX two accounts than it is to PLEX one. The first can do all the things needed to
keep you in a good, PvP alliance, while a character on the other account can
handle collecting all that isk for the first character to blow through. It seems counter-intuitive, but it really is
true. Without Valeria’s account,
Talvorian wouldn’t be flying capitals today, or have the isk to sell characters
or stock markets.

And that’s how you get to 50 billion playing casually. It really takes the edge off, so much that you
won’t get upset at losing your Brutix Navy Issue trying to get to the Revenant event.
Well, not as upset, anyways. (Well done, Marmite.
You picked a beautiful spot to camp!)

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